


a light is never dim, cold, or alone

by lackingother



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alfred needs his tea, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Batfamily Feels, Brotherly Angst, Bruce is Bruce, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Hurt, Jason Todd isn't angry for once, Jason Todd-centric, Platonic Relationships, Protective Damian Wayne, Soft and sad, vague af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-04 23:35:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16799284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingother/pseuds/lackingother
Summary: Dick meets him over fire, and the fact doesn’t surprise him nearly as much as it should.





	a light is never dim, cold, or alone

**Author's Note:**

> A thing to remind me how to write.

I.

Dick meets him over fire, and the fact doesn’t surprise him nearly as much as it should. Jason notices with an immediacy that briefly impresses him, and Dick sees the slight tilt of the helmet, the glinting of cold metal enough reaction to prompt movement.

“Sincerest apologies,” the modulator hums out, when he is in earshot, “I’d offer you a drink but”--Jason cues the fire with a tilt of head--“I’m pretty homeless at the moment.”

“Didn’t snuff out a cigarette?” Dick asks, idly, hazarding on the lines they’d set years ago.

Jason doesn’t answer, only stands there, still, head tilted at him in appraisal.

“I quit.” The man says, stating it, unfolding his arms. Turns to the fire. Nothing like anger, or even irritation, flares in the hard lines of his body. Relief plays at reluctance in Dick’s mind, as he watches his brother’s unaffected silhouette. Jason’s movements are placid, the absence of its natural hostility off-putting. Alarming. It grates on him. Dick has always been the receiving end of that ferocity; without it, this feels almost impersonal. (He's glad the man stopped smoking.)

“I’m disappearing.” He tells him, without turning back, and Dick sees how the fire distorts, relieves. The flames rake at Jason’s body, sears him into the dark skyline. (Like a haze of sun.)

“We could’ve helped,” Dick says, because it’s the only thing he’d allow himself to. It’s useless now. Saying anymore would be careless.

“I didn’t want you to.” He still doesn’t remove the hood.

“How long will you run?” Dick’s voice doesn’t shake; the emboldened symbol he wears keeps him suspended, away from the aches that tremor through his chest.

Jason doesn’t remove the hood, but he turns--faces his brother.

“Dunno. Settling was definitely a bad idea.” A pause. “Tell Tim I told you so.” If Dick could see his face, Jason would be smiling by now. All teeth, with a crooked edge, teasing anger to his face. He'd face the world like that--singular and ironic.

“Jay,” Dick tries, no longer suspended but reaching, reaching, “we can still make this work. I have connections in the force. Tim could create a new identity for you and Bab would erase your tracks. Hell, Damian can fly you out to whatever foreign country’s language you’re fluent in.” He can hear his own desperation like the distant crackle of stray shots. (Jason's fluent in at least twenty languages. He remembers being stunned at his brother’s almost seamless grasp on a few of the world’s most obscure dialects that _one_ time in China.) “We can still help you, don’t you see?”--Dick's words sound dull, even to him--“You don’t need to do this. Not alone.”

 _"I’m fluent in loner,"_ _Jason would say, then snort at the very notion of help._

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t say anything at all, the absence of snark and wry remarks a more obvious presence than Dick would like. He misses it now, in Jason’s silence. He thinks about missing it more when his brother is gone. 

“This is okay,” come the words, more steadily than Dick had imagined. The modulator sounds them out with a kind of easy cruelty. Like last words.

“It’s not.” the other man says, cracks. He can’t do this. Not again.

A faint click whistles into the air; the sound of air releasing draws his gaze upward, and Dick finally sees Jason--the sharp eyes, the soft freckles, the harsh brow.

“Hey,” he says, softly, in a kind way Dick had once thought he’d never be capable of, “I’ll be okay. You’ll live, and so will I. We’ll meet again, dickie.”

He says this like a promise, and Dick almost believes it. He had believed so easily before. Faith should be simple, for him. (How many times has he lost him?)

“I could’ve been with you,” Dick says, just as Jason’s shadow falls over him, “could’ve stopped this.” He could have. He always could have.

“‘Sn’t your fault, dickhead,” chides the other, not unkindly, “never was.” Calloused fingers hook onto his nape, and Dick is tugged forward. Jason meets him midway, a center of warmth forming where their foreheads align, clumsily.

It grounds him, grounds them both.

“Don’t look too closely.” Jason says, breath ghosting over Dick’s nose. This pulls a short laugh from the other man, before, “you can’t burn me, Little Wing--not really.”

Jason meets Dick’s eyes, and there’s something knowing there, a glint of recognition. A dim smile crosses his lips.

“I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, big bird,” and the hand goes, a slight of warmth.

Dick watches his brother fall into fire and flame. 

II.

Splatters of dirt and blood dash across his leather gloves, the steel-enforced boots. He casts a cursory gaze over all the bodies and thinks, _not as dead as I would like_ , as he listens to their wheezing breaths.

Grayson’s influence. The boy turns his head to the shadows.

“Mother,” Damian says to the darkness, almost hisses it, “would you be so kind to refrain from attacking me every time I am to visit?”

The dark corners do not answer, until one echoes a faint click of tongue and a shape emerges seamlessly from the black.

“You know you are no longer welcome, my son.” Talia moves with elaboration, mindful of her body the way a lion might. She comes to a delicate pause a few meters before the boy, body bare of sharp points and lethal edges.

Damian doesn't sheath his blades. “Your men have been welcome enough."

His blue eyes are indisputable behind tinted lens, but the scowl isn’t.

“Tell me where he is.” Red glints from metal.

A cool eye. “You let anger take hold of you.”

His lips curl. “ _Where is he?”_

A _tt_. The disapproving kind, the one Talia releases when he is reckless and bold and stupid. Damian doesn’t care.

She shifts. Her eyes are keen on his stance, his blades, his cold, cold face.

“I taught you to be better than this. Dami.” Her voice is soft. He knows well enough the low menace lacing through those words. As if a fly had been caught in her gutter.

Damian slights his head to the side, tilts his katanas to catch light, and says, flatly, “I have triumphed over you many times, Mother _."_

After a moment, she says, “I recall your victories.” Something like fondness crosses into her voice at that, and Talia releases a slow crescent of breath--the closest resemblance to a sigh he'd ever seen his mother give. Her brow lessens in its immaculate poise and she looks almost tired, for a short moment.

“I do not know of his whereabouts. He must have known not to come to me, with my connections to you.” His mother looks at him. He does not think it is pity in her eyes--pity had long been cut from her. Mercy would be more accurate. Better than the former; kinder, even.

“He has gone, then,” she says. 

Damian doesn’t answer, only lets his blades fall. There’s a sudden heaviness in his hands, and it reminds him of when he first ripped hearts from the chests of men. How the weight of human susceptibility sat, bleeding and warm, in his palm.

“Yes,” he says, voice catching on the harsh thing in his chest, “he left.”

The boy wishes he could cut it out.

III.

Bruce tracks him across the continent, the Atlantic, and the man knows this is all too easy but for once he doesn't mind, doesn't care to figure out why.

He watches the blinking eye from the screens (of his Batmobile, his phone, his tablet) like it’s a lifeline. (A reminder.) It broaches the shores of Morocco and begins to traverse the African continent, a steady hum of progress across the Sahara desert, a heartbeat tracing along the Nile River, a body irrevocably approaching Ethiopia. 

When the blink stutters and dies away, Bruce thinks the world may be taunting him.

Bruce thinks that it is not unfair to consider the possibility that Jason Todd may be, too. 

IV.

He is familiar with this behavior. He has seen it for so long, years upon years, the way Bruce thumbs through the past, as meticulous and precise as he would his mother’s old letters.

On the screen, the boy--small, lanky, younger than his eyes appear--is framed with light, and he is grinning sharply, with some daring thing in his gaze. The bottom reads: _15 years-old, Orphan, Dead._

Bruce does not acknowledge Alfred's presence. The old man leaves, for a cup of earl grey.

V.

Tim is on a coffee run when he sees him, standing in line for bagels like a normal person.

Tim, words _never trust your assumptions_ embedded in his brain, doubts it for a moment. So he questions, just as he has been taught and just as he has learned, sharp blue on the casual slope of shoulders, the crooked edge to the man's mouth as Jason (he has already decided) speaks and laughs, with another man at his arm.

 _Fatality lies in surety,_ Bruce's voice says.

Tim forgets almost immediately about his severe sleep-deprivation and runs, carelessly, to him, to the brother who had left them behind.

“Hey,” he blurts, caught between the winded swells of joy, just as Jason turns (and the sharp lines come into view), “didn't think I'd see you here.” A cheeky grin spills haplessly across the young man’s face-- _he found him_ \--his happiness peaks when he sees the flicks of green in the blue, the eyes that have always turned to fire in throes of anger.

 _Fatality lies in surety,_ he knows.

But, Tim assures himself, this is Jason they know. (Somewhere in his brain, there is an echo of inconsistency, a faint wisp of hypocrisy.)

The man by Jason’s side says, “Darling,” and suddenly the image stills--sharp jaw, sharp eyes, sharp lines. His brother never did prefer pet names. (He only lets Dick call him Little Wing.) Jason has a hand at the man’s waist _\--_ did he always show affection so openly? _(_ Tim never knows about his romantic involvements.) A phone is tucked in his left, screen just beneath a stilled thumb. Frozen mid-text. Jason is right dominant.

 _Openings in your brain_ , Bruce had once said of assumptions.

Tim hears his head--the noise, the panic and fear and confusion. Realization threatens to displace him, and he hangs on, grabs at the fraying threads.

Jason turns then, fully, and sees him for the first time. The first time, and there is no recognition that molds the confusion from his face; Jason tilts his head, smiles an awkward smile, and the similarities fall away with the dark fringe, the missing freckles, the too-kind lines, and four, politely concerned words; “Do I know you?”

When he leaves, Tim believes the vivid burn behind his eyes are due to his seasonal allergies. (He doesn’t have any.)

Later, Red Robin makes a careless mistake and a man in a hood saves him.


End file.
